Working with Fortune 500 companies it has become apparent that having a single Intranet homepage to present the same content to each user regardless of their location, job role or interests is simply ineffective. At Bonzai, we wanted to address this problem by trying to ensure that we could provide the right content, to the right users at the right time for SharePoint and Office 365 Intranets.

We envisioned a world that would give content publishers the ability to push content to users in an intuitive way. A world in which end users could easily personalize and change the type of content they see on their intranet so it is always relevant.

The majority of SharePoint intranets at present don’t do this. Those that do, only enable content targeting for a subset of content types such as news.

After listening to many enterprise intranet users, we recognized that contextual experiences for ALL intranet content is paramount. Not only that, but we heard that organizations wanted contextualization to be intelligent.

What is Intelligent Content Targeting for SharePoint and Office 365?

Essentially, based on a subset of properties that are stored for your end-user, users will get content based on their pre-set characteristics.

This means that intranet users will be fed content specific to them regardless of the web part or content type—news, events, links, applications, etc. For example, if a user is from your head office in the United States, they will see content that is targeted to this location.

What if we need to target content based on other properties, such as job role or management-level?

Yep, you can certainly do that in Bonzai Intranet for SharePoint and Office 365! We’ve developed our out-of-the-box solution so you can easily create contextual content based on user needs and it’s super easy to set up.

In What Ways is Content Commonly Targeted?

In Bonzai you have up to 4 different targeting categories with as many options as you want in each. With that being said we typically work with organizations who choose to target content on the following:

Location: you can target content to different people based on their geographical areas such as Australia vs Canada vs USA vs Germany.

Departments: you can target content based on the departments users are in—this way HR, Marketing and Accounting get out important announcements to their specific departments.

Job Role: you can target content based on job roles—this is particularly helpful when announcing new positions internally to relevant employees or perhaps compliance testing deadlines for required for certain roles (among many other applications!).

How do you create targeted content?

It’s simple. We’ve developed Bonzai so all you have to do is check off your content targeting requirements. For example, below is a news page I created to be targeted to everyone in the organization that works between Vancouver, Canada and Sydney, Australia.

Although this seems simple the ability to combine targeting options makes this extremely powerful and we have found a great way to decreased email in an organization from a communications perspective. Why? Because you have the power to target content in a very fine grained nature.

What do users see?

Below is an example of a homepage I see with content that has been uniquely targeted to me based on a geographic criterion:

However, when I change my settings from Vancouver and Sydney to soley, New York…the content on my homepage changes.

And, voila! A whole new homepage targeted for employees in New York.

What has changed for the end-user?

The bright red important message is removed because its only relevant to the Vancouver location.

The news is now targeted specifically to people in New York.

Your important links, leadership messages, events, applications, and spotlights are all targeted to employees in New York.

The Net-Net

The powerful thing with content targeting from an end-user perspective, is that the information you see on your intranet will always be relevant to you. From an authoring and organizational perspective, you have the power to ensure content is always relevant and timely to maxmize user adoption. This is one of many capabilities of content targeting in Bonzai. In the next article, I will show you how you can apply this feature to other areas in your Intranet.